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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
August 24 - September 11, 2022
creating new things is what really matters.
completed creative projects are the blood flow of your Second Brain. They keep the whole system nourished, fresh, and primed for action.
don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”
Start by asking yourself, “What projects am I currently committed to moving forward?” and then create a new project folder for each one.
What’s worrying you that you haven’t taken the time to identify as a project?
What do you need to follow up on from the past?
What actions are you already taking that are actually part of a bigger project you’ve not yet identified?
What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project?
Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the archives, and each time you start a new project, look through your archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse.
To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher
He started with an initial read of the entire novel, noting down anything that stuck out to him:
Coppola then began to add his own interpretations, distilling and reconstituting his own version of the story.
In his own words, “I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence, expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.”
We might imagine a movie as emerging straight out of the mind of a screenplay writer or director, when in fact it depends on collecting and refining source material.
Quantum Notetaking: How to Create Notes for an Unknown Future
When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets,
Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away.
Discoverability—The Missing Link in Making Notes Useful
discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful.
To enhance the discoverability of your notes, we can turn to a simple habit you probably remember from school: highlighting the most important points.
Paradoxically, the more notes they collect, the less discoverable they become!
What do you do when communicating with a very busy, very impatient, very important person? You distill your message down to the key points and action steps.
Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique
The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.”
By limiting what I keep to only the best, most important, most relevant parts, I’m making all the subsequent steps of organizing, distilling, and expressing much easier.
Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points.
the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words.
you have only a limited amount of time and energy, and the faster you can move through your notes, the more diverse and interesting ideas you can connect together.
You can customize how much attention you spend on a note based on your energy level and time available.
Your highlights are like signposts and waypoints that help you navigate through the network of ideas you’re exploring.
Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools.
Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great
Picasso’s act of distillation involves stripping away the unnecessary so that only the essential remains. Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing.
it can end up with a result that looks so simple, it seems like anyone could have made it. That simplicity masks the effort that was needed to get there.
As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.
The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers
Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail.
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.
Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use.
You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful.
every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary.
the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This
Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult
Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight.
Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day.
When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.
The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance.
When you come back to it, give yourself no more than thirty seconds and see if you can rapidly get up to speed on what it’s about using the highlights you previously made.
